Quotable: Rebecca Traister Stands Up For Tina Fey

“Feminist comedy cannot always take as its targets the Jesse Jameses and the Richard Nixons of the world. Women also have to be able to mock — sometimes harshly, sometimes sexually, sometimes intellectually — the Sarah Palins and the Bombshell McGees, to laugh at our single selves, at our high-achieving selves, at our professional selves and our maternal and sexual and idealistic selves, or we will quickly re-earn a reputation for humorlessness. We can’t expect to escape all the mean jokes, or the mean girls. And we can’t lay the blame for the often ruthless nature of equal-opportunity mockery at the feet of a woman who never promised to do anything but entertain us.”